Northwestern University

Faster SSCC Access Using Bash

I use SSH regularly to login remotely to servers for experiments and
data analysis. For instance, Northwestern’s Social Sciences Computing
Cluster is available with an
SSH remote login and using X11
forwarding, I can access RStudio and run analyses
that require more memory than my office iMac has. However, logging into the
SSCC over SSH isn’t as quick and launching a program in Spotlight.

While browsing a friend’s .bashrc on Github, I realized I could
use a simple Bash function to speed things up. Copy and paste the following
into Terminal:

After you restart Terminal.app, you can launch RStudio remotely by typing
Rsscc, or whatever you renamed my function to. In principle, you could also
create a simple menu for choosing among multiple servers or programs using a bit of
read and
case.